Digital Habitat:
Sweden Unlimited
Words: Sue Apfelbaum
Photo: Jan Hilmer
The first thing you should know about Sweden Unlimited is that none of its members are from Sweden. The New York-based three-member design collective -- Richard Agerbeek, Leja and Alex Kress (pictured left to right) -- and synth pop outfit, known simply as Sweden, do have a few things in common with their namesake country, though. Both have a great sense of style, and until you get to know them, they seem rather cool.
Meeting identical blonde twins Leja and Alex for the first time raised fears of getting them mixed up, and that, matched with the slickness of their chic Tribeca loft, which they share with partner and band mate Richard, made it hard not to feel intimidated. But as Sweden's colorful, retro graphics would suggest, this is a crew that mixes plenty of fun into their designs as well as their music.
The trio met in 1998, when Richard, an art school drop-out, was thrift store shopping, and Leja asked to take his picture. At the time, he was working as an errand boy at a mural design company, Leja was a controller for an Internet service provider and Alex was retouching at photography agencies -- in their words, "all boring jobs." Needing a creative outlet, Sweden the band was born.
Leja: I bought an old Casio CT-310 from the '80s because of its beautiful platinum color and it was really easy to use. Richard got a Casio DG-20 digital guitar -- again mostly because it looked so cool, but also it has a built in drum machine. Alex got a Samick guitar (based on a Stratocaster) with a bunch of distortion pedals like Big Muff and Lovetone Cheese Source. With music gear, we really still like the original stuff we bought and after four years we still love the way it all sounds. We've made a few additions like old Roland drum machines and keyboards, and Korg synths. Our stuff had such a beautiful aesthetic; 1970s and '80s technology was so inventive with its consumer products, we kind of took this aesthetic our instruments had and applied it to the "Sweden" visual style as well. All our flyers featured a different '80s product (like the first Walkman, futuristic calculators, boom boxes) and we later made our band Web site a giant Casio calculator watch where the different number buttons served as navigation.
About a year after the band started, the trio decided to pool their collective strengths and form their own Web design company, Sweden Unlimited. "We were all at a point where we wanted to do something creative that embodied all the different things we were interested in (art, music, fashion, photography) and with the new medium of Web design, it all just sort of fell into place," says Alex. Soon they had their first client, the rock-inspired fashion label Built by Wendy, and created builtbywendy.com, launching a virtual Web design empire. (The three of them handle 20 ongoing clients and haven't lost one since the business began.) Sweden's niche is making sites that reflect the true identities of their clients. Take their work for fashion label United Bamboo: Leja says, "A couple of seasons ago we made their site look like a movie trailer -- as if the designers were the stars of a film about their clothes." They also design and maintain the popular all-Flash site called VivianLives (vivianlives.com) based on a virtual girl named Vivian, that's fully animated and highly interactive (users can flip through her Rolodex, read her journal or take her dog Omelet for a walk).
